Occasional reflections on Life, the World, and Mathematics

The following problem appeared on one of yesterday’s GCSE maths exams, leading to considerable frustration and mediaattention:

Hannah has 6 orange sweets and some yellow sweets.

Overall, she has n sweets.

The probability of her taking 2 orange sweets is 1/3.

Prove that: n^2-n-90=0

^ is “to the power of”

Now, I am a professional probabilist, and I wasn’t immediately sure how to do it. Why not? Well, there’s something missing: The problem doesn’t tell us what Hannah’s options are. Did she pick sweets at random from the bag? How many? Are we asked the probability that she took 2 orange sweets rather than 3 yellow, given that she actually prefers the orange? Did she choose between taking sweets out of the bag and putting it away until after dinner?

There should have been a line that said, “She picks two sweets from the bag, at random, without replacement, with each sweet in the bag equally likely to be taken.”

According to the news reports

Hannah’s was just one of the many supposed “real life” problems that the students were required to tackle.

This is just an example of the ridiculous approach to mathematical “applications” induced by our testing culture. It’s not a “real life” maths problem. It’s a very elementary book problem, decked out with a little story that serves only to confuse the matter. You are supposed to know a standard rule for decoding the chatter. If you try to make use of any actual understanding of the situation being described you will only be misled. (Richard Feynman described this problem, when he was on a commission to examine junior high school maths textbooks in California in the 1960s. His entertaining account is the chapter “Judging Books by their Covers” in Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman.)